PLN stands for Personal Learning Network. It is essentially the people you know, meet or work with virtually. Each person has more PLNs than they realize; these could be social media sites, work sites, and much more. Each digital app and web tool has its own community; facebook, twitter, pinterest, etc. Basically, any person you connect with online becomes part of your learning network; whether that's a quick facebook like on someone's post or a visit to someone's blog site to gather information.
Here are some ways that educators are using their PLNs:
– Professional development – learn from content-area specialists
– Locate resources for your classroom, such as free websites and software
– Get lesson plan ideas from master teachers
– Learn about new technology and how to integrate it into your teaching
– Find collaborative solutions
– Find interesting links to education news
Being a part of various digital communities and expanding your PLN is a great and effective way to enhance your learning abilities as well as your students. It is so simple to learn using online sites because with just a click of a button you could view teaching strategies from someone across the world! Online learning is expanding the horizons of many each minute. People work together, share ideas and thoughts, post about their interests and get comments and feedback within minutes. Having a PLN is very useful for teachers especially (as you've read above). It does take time to build your network and participate online but once you do, you have a great knowledge base and a large community for each web tool you choose to explore. These communities help you build on your very own skills and reciprocate such learning to your students around you!
Here is a picture of my little personal learning environment. As I have repeatedly said, I am new to the digital learning world so as you can see my PLN is quite small. Nevertheless, it is expanding gradually and it is better than not having a PLN at all. I used a really cool web tool called Mindomo to create my PLN map. Mindomo is a fun and fairly simple web tool to operate. It is a great way for teachers to introduce the idea of PLNs to their students and have them visually map out their own networks. I recommend visiting the site and creating your very own PLN!
Check out another great online tool that encourages collaboration within a classroom. This tool is called Lino-It. It is a virtual online sticky note app that allows users to choose from a variety of sticky notes and text fonts, colours and sizes. In our class we constantly utilized this web tool when were asked to brainstorm ideas or gather our thoughts. Lino-it is a great and easy way for teachers to get students to jot their ideas down and be able to analyze who says what. This web tool allows you to share sticky notes, videos, pictures and other files virtually. I would definitely be using this app constantly in my classroom, it is easily accessible and very simple to navigate through!
Here is a picture of a collaborate Lino-it sheet my class and I put together! Each of us tagged our post with out initials so out teacher could identify the publisher of each post. It was a cool and effective way for each of us to present our thoughts and learn from one another.
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